Lateral Thinking, Open Source, and a Better Path

A little lateral thinking can frequently jolt people out of their normal trajectory and put them on a new path to fame and fortune. See if these two Open Source developers can give you inspiration.

Sage Weil was developing a distributed storage system while working on his Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz.

At some point, he realized that his Ceph file system would never be used unless it was included in the Linux kernel, so he set out to make that happen. He went to kernel workshops, met developers in person, and eventually had the Ceph code accepted and rolled into the Linux kernel. It immediately drew interest from distributed file system experts.

Weil has since started Inktank, to support Ceph users and explore how clustered file systems are applicable to “big data” environments.

On a related note, there’s brewing your own beer, with the help of Open Source.

Phillip Lee is an electrical engineering and computer science doctoral candidate at the University of Texas, who put together Brewtarget, an Open Source application to help manage your beer recipes. His program covers a variety of formulas from American Pilsner to Bavarian Hefeweizen to Irish Red. Lee is planning to add new features and the program was accepted into Debian.

There are all kinds of opportunities to develop new systems, applications, businesses, and careers, with Open Source and Linux.

Are you thinking laterally, yet? Maybe a few home-brew beers would help get the imagination going.